Over 101 SEO Tools (Free & Premium) You’ll Ever Need

Search Engine Optimization (SEO), as you probably know, is the process of improving the visibility of your website in search engine results pages (SERPs).

But do remember…

Your goal should really be to make a fantastic website that people love and tell their friends about and link to and want to experience. As a result, your website starts to become stronger and stronger in the rankings. — Matt Cutts (@mattcutts)

If you’re a SEO professional then you would already know that SEO Tools change rapidly and there’s always one after the other. In fact, I have done several SEO Tools posts that is related to the different aspects of SEO.

And you know what… a good percentage of those blog posts are worthless today. Because most of the tools that I have mentioned on those blog posts are either obsolete or we don’t need it today.

That’s why I have consolidated some of the best SEO tools that exist today on a single page. So, here is a roundup of some of the best Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tools you’ll ever need. Seriously.

Premium Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Software

You can consider the following tools as an SEO platform rather than just as a tool. They’re some of the best SEO & marketing tools as well. So, obviously it fits into multiple categories and that’s why I decided to feature them as “Premium”.

Moz Pro (Premium) — is an all-in-one set of SEO, social media, site audit, and web analytics tools that help increase your search engine visibility and keep you ahead of your competitors. Pricing starts at $99/month with a 30-day free trial.

HubSpot (Premium) — contains everything you need to do internet marketing — from blogging, to SEO and social. Pricing starts at $200/month with a 30-day free trial.

SEMrush (Premium) — is one of the most popular competitor analysis tool that’s also good for keyword research, backlink analysis, rank tracking, advertising research, website auditing, etc. Pricing starts at $69.95/month.

Searchmetrics Suite(Premium) — allows you to monitor keywords, analyze rankings, evaluate links and compare the SEO visibility of domains. You need to request a demo for pricing as there are no predefined pricing plans available.

Web CEO (Freemium) — is a cloud-based solution for website owners, digital marketing agencies and in-house SEO teams which provides white-label SEO tools for team collaboration and branded SEO reporting for clients. Pricing starts at $69/month for the premium version.

SEO Website Analysis & Audit Tools

Website analysis and auditing is the process of reviewing a site to make sure that its web pages are search engine friendly. It involves the analysis of both on-page and off-page SEO aspects of a website (and may also include competitor analysis and conversion optimization depending upon the purpose of the audit).

SEO Score

The following tools analyze your domain name and gives quick insights on how to improve your website.

SEO Competitive Analysis Tools

Today, competitive analysis (or competitor analysis) is crucial to the success of any business. And, SEO Competitor Analysis is the process of analyzing and understanding your competitors’ internet marketing strategies and techniques. It’s all about learning from your competitors so that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

BuzzSumo (Freemium) — to analyze what content performs best for any topic or competitor. Pricing starts at $99/month for the premium version with a 14-day free trial.

Rivalfox (Premium) — is a competitor analysis and intelligence platform for SEO, traffic, social and content monitoring. Pricing starts at $49/month with a 14-day free trial — no credit card required.

TrackMaven (Premium) — helps you identify marketing opportunities, optimize content distribution, and report on real-time progress and makes it easy to beat your competitors and improve your marketing across paid, owned, and earned channels. You have to fill-up a form to get pricing.

Note: Obviously, I haven’t included SEMrush, Moz, Open Site Explorer, etc. to avoid duplicate entries. As you probably know, they’re all great tools for competitive analysis. It’s just that you have to use a combination of tools mentioned on this blog post to perform a comprehensive analysis.

Keyword Analysis & Research Tools

Keyword research is the practice of finding search terms (known as keywords) that people enter in search engines to find relevant web pages. It’s a process that’s mostly done by Search Engine Optimization (SEO) professionals in order to create search engine friendly content.

Übersuggest — get thousands of keywords ideas in under a minute with this free keyword suggestion tool. Also try,KeywordTool.io.

Wordtracker (Freemium) — to find the best keywords related to your search term. It also shows how much traffic (search volume) each keyword gets and what to focus on. Pricing starts at $27/month with a 7-day free trial for the premium version. Also try, WordStream.

HitTail (Premium) — tells you in real-time, the most promising organic keywords you should target based on your existing traffic. Pricing starts at $9.95/month with a free trial option. Also try, Long Tail Pro (Premium).

On-Page SEO Analysis Tools

Today, Search Engine Optimization is all about user experience (UX). And it’s something that you have direct control over. If you focus on user experience then it’s less likely that you get hurt by a Google penalty. The following on-page SEO tools helps you to make your web pages more search-friendly.

Website Crawler

To identify potential issues on your web pages.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool (Freemium) — is a popular desktop program (PC or Mac) that crawls websites’ links, images, CSS, script and apps from an SEO perspective. You can optionally purchase a license for £99/year that removes the 500 URI crawl limit.

Live Keyword Analysis — is a simple tool and is one of my favorite. It helps you analyze your keyword density in real-time.

nTopic (Freemium) — is not exactly a keyword density tool but it analyze the content and helps you improve your content by including related keywords as well.

Note: Keyword Density is not a big deal today. It was a “thing” among SEOs when search engines used to rank pages based on keyword density. For example, back in early 2000s, it was easy to rank a web page by adding the relevant keywords to the URL, title, meta keyword & description tags, H1-H6 titles, content, etc. But it no longer works today as keyword density is just one of the 200+ search ranking signals (on Google).

Page Speed Performance

It’s no secret that faster websites create happy users, and results in increased user experience. And the best thing is, search engines incorporate page loading time as a search signal.

It basically means that faster web pages will outrank slow pages and the following tools will help you optimize your page speed.

Off-Page SEO Analysis Tools

Off-Page SEO is all about link building and everything else that you do outside your website — so as to improve the ranking of your web pages.

Link Analysis & Audit

Track your (and your competitor’s) link profile.

Majestic (Freemium) — is one of the largest link database and it shows the inbound link and site summary data for any domain name. Pricing starts at $78.99/month with a 7-day money-back guarantee for the premium version. Also try, Majestic Backlink Analyzer (for Google Chrome).

Ahrefs(Freemium) — is one of the most popular tool for checking links. It shows links, linking domains, anchors, and the best pages of a domain. Pricing starts at $79/month for the premium version with a 7-day money-back guarantee.

Open Site Explorer (Freemium) — to track the link profile of any website over time. Pricing starts at $99/month with a 30-day free trial.

NerdyData — is a new type of search engine that lets you do complex research on the web, using source code.

SEO SpyGlass (Freemium) — reveals the link building strategy of your competitors. Costs a one-time $124.75 for the premium version.

StatCounter (Freemium) — is a popular hit counter that is free for up to 250,000 page views a month. It shows real-time traffic stats to you (and your users as well if you want). Pricing starts at $5/month for the premium version.

SERP Checker & Rank Tracking Tools

I have tried tons of free search engine rank checker tools when I used to track the ranking of my targeted keywords in the past. Then I realized that none of them are perfect, and that checking our rankings manually is the best way. Or I say, we don’t check it at all.

If you’re a blogger then the weekly organic traffic is much more important than the rankings of different keywords. That said, if the ranking is crucial to your business and you want to track hundreds of keywords, then try the following rank tracking tools or consider a Premium SEO Software.

Rank Tracker (Freemium) — is a desktop software that helps you track rankings of your website for multiple keywords in 346+ local and international search engines. Costs a one-time $124.75 for the premium version.

SERP Trends — is a simple web browser extension for Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. When we perform a search query on Google, it automatically shows dynamics in SERPs so that we will know how rankings of different websites has changed compared to previous day.

Local SEO Tools

If you own a local business then you will need the following tools.

Moz Local (Premium) — ensures your business listings are correct, consistent, and visible across the web so search engines and new customers can find you. Costs $84 per year per location. Also try, Moz Listing Score (to check your listings on Google, Bing, and other local search engines).

Whitespark (Freemium) — offers tools and services help you manage and optimize your local search presence and reach.

Monitor SERP Fluctuations & Volatility

SERPmetrics — flux reports show search engine volatility over the last day and month.

Visualize Google Algorithmic Updates

If you have done black hat SEO in the past then you know that you get a manual penalty for that and can take necessary action to get out of it. But what about an algorithmic penalty? How will you know if you got hit by a Google algorithmic penalty?

Well, you can simply check your Google Analytics stats and see if there’s any unusual drop in traffic. You can then manually correlate it with Google Algorithm Change History. Alternatively, try any of the following tools:

Algoroo — lets you visualize various Google updates on a chart. They’re also monitoring roughly 17,000 keywords to 100 search positions deep and looks for fluctuations.

Word Count Tool — count the number of words and characters in the selected text in one-click.

Note: My primary web browser is Google Chrome. So, the above list is made for Chrome users. But I’m sure that there’s a Firefox alternative for all the above add-ons. If you’re unable to find a Firefox alternative then let me know as a comment below and I will find one for you.

Conclusion

Once again, categorizing different tools was a real challenge as most of them fits into multiple categories. But, you definitely DON’T need all the 101+ tools listed here. Actually, not even 20 unless you really need them.

I’m using less than 25 tools from the above list on a monthly basis and it’s more likely that I might have missed your favorite SEO tool. So, let me know let me know as a comment below and I will be happy to add it on the next update of this list.

Hi Mahesh, in response to your email saying I should leave my link here – here it is! The fifty6 Page Grader has been built to be a super fast way of analysing any individual page for the structural on-page elements which go towards good SEO foundation. It can be found at https://www.fifty6.co.uk/page-grader/

About Mahesh (@maheshone)

Hey there, I’m Mahesh (@maheshone). I started learning and doing and experimenting web 2.0 stuff back in 2004 and eventually became a full-time computer nerd after graduation. Minterest is a digital marketing and technology journal that I founded in 2007 to feed my super curiosity (yes, it’s single authored). I write about tech, marketing, and everything in between that excites me. And I love to work with small businesses to help them get the most out of the web. Outside of that, I'm equally passionate about the financial markets and I also spend a lot of time doing random things (see random facts about me). Say hi: m@maheshone.com. Read More »